USA, the Presidency of Millionaires

There is a website dedicated to collecting intelligence on the world’s richest individuals. Its headquarters is in Singapore, but has offices in different cities in the United States and Europe. The company, whose English name is Wealth X, has thousands of members who are constantly receiving economic reports on the movements of capital of a select group of super-multimillionaires that exist around the world.

According to that company, the number of privileged people who accumulate the greatest world capital does not exceed 185,795. If we assume that planet Earth is inhabited by more than 7 billion people, we realize that this is a club that belongs to, more or less, 0.001 percent of the population.

A recent report from this company tells us that the candidate who is in the lead for the Republican Party for the November presidential election, Mitt Romney, belongs, based on his wealth, to this select group of super-millionaires. The 2011 report puts Romney at the 0.001 percent of people in the country, where members in the United States have accumulated a fortune of at least $250 million. Wealth X estimates that around 58,000 people in the U.S. have more than $30 million. In a population of over 300 million citizens, the percentage is much lower than the 1 percent protesters of the Occupy Wall Street movement have claimed.

It’s no secret that here, we live in a country of great economic disparity. Where the income of an employee of any corporation is light years behind the salary of the president of the board of directors in the same company.

Of course, politicians in this country refuse to believe we live with these inequalities and say, again and again, that the society in which we live is the fairest that exists on the planet. They claim that our democracy is perfect and we are the best example to the world.

Apparently, the distinguished Republican who hopes to defeat Barack Obama in the election next November had a slip of the tongue, as just a few days ago he declared that anyone who does not have a fortune should aspire to run for this political office. According to the possible Republican presidential nominee, his father taught him that no one should aspire to a post in public office if he needed the salary of that office to pay the mortgage of his home. How nice of the super-millionaire to tell us who may or may not be president of this country!

It is of course known that in reality, this is more or less true, but I do not think anyone, until now, had dared to say it publicly. I do not think any politician in this country, so far, would have dared to say that to be president of the U.S. must be a millionaire. That would be to accept that in this “democracy of equals,” those that come to govern are “more equal” than the rest of the population, or in other words, “If Tim does not have, Tim has no value.”

The candidates for president of the country have never been part of the poor of this world. Let us see some examples from 1992 to the present: Ross Perot, $3.58 million; Mitt Romney, $250 million; John Kerry, $240 million; and Al Gore at $100 million. That’s not counting the millions of Bush and Clinton, McCain and Obama. This is to say that what Romney now utters to the wind is something that everyone and their mother knows.

It’s not just that one has to raise millions and millions of dollars to be eligible to be president of the nation; one must also have them. An old adage says that money brings money, but you have to add that in the materialistic world we live in, money is power.

No one yet knows if Mitt Romney is the candidate who will face Barack Obama in the November presidential election. Although it is very likely true, it does not matter if it is him or another. What we can say is that no “ordinary candidate” will be Obama’s opponent in the presidential election in November because, as Romney’s ad said a few days ago, only the wealthy have the right to become president of the United States.